


the day we died

by 8611



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural, Dark, F/F, M/M, apocalypse-ish, bolivian army ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-25
Updated: 2013-01-25
Packaged: 2017-11-26 21:38:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/654666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8611/pseuds/8611
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He pulls back just far enough to press a second kiss, smaller, quieter, to Stiles’ scar, and then he’s up and off. Stiles watches as he tucks his hands into his pockets, but he doesn’t look back. They stopped looking back years ago.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the day we died

**Author's Note:**

> This owes a whole hell of a lot to _The Dark Knight Rises_ and the last episode of _Angel_. I’ve also been trying to write it for a while, and after stalling on it for months I finally sat down today and wrote it in like an hour or two. I guess I needed to go back to a writing style that I really haven’t used since Inception, in that actual plot explanation need not apply. 
> 
> The title is from a _Fringe_ episode.

Allison is wearing a shade of lipstick that Stiles knows belongs on Lydia’s lips, but her eyes are what matter, shadowed under her hood but alive with something that would boil down to _rage_ in a lesser person. Allison, though. Allison has always been good at turning her rage into action, into arrows and long fingers that latch onto skin and pull. 

Stiles breaths in, and smells ash and burning metal and when he hefts the bat above his shoulder, at the ready, Allison shifts next to him, her bow tucked neatly into the junction of her shoulder and chest. 

“Ready,” Allison says. 

“Always,” Stiles says, as the first of the shadows slinks out of the darkness and into the alley, red eyes and gaping mouth. 

When the bat breaks he starts ripping at throats with a hunting knife instead. They used to yelp when they did this, but now, with the blood so thick it’s running into the gutter like a river dying in the sun, they’re something else. Changed, twisted, just a bit more to the wrong side. 

They go back to Lydia’s, and Stiles stands unmoving in the shower for a long time, watching as the water goes from red to, finally, clear, and knows that Allison is probably fingers deep in Lydia in the next room, making her arch and gasp and remember what it’s like to be human. 

\---

It’s dark when Stiles leaves, too early in the morning for the day to really get started, but one of the little coffee carts is out, heavily reinforced. Stiles’ eyes go wide so that the retina scanner can read them, and then the window slides open, a man staring at him owlishly. 

“Just a coffee,” Stiles says, tries to smile at the man but his face can’t quite get there, because it’s difficult to remember how to smile in the dark and when one corner of his mouth is twisted up in scar tissue. 

“Milk or sugar?”

Stiles just shakes his head, hands over eight bucks in return for the coffee, and holds it close to his chest as he walks west on 14th. Steam curls from the lid, and he tugs at his hoodie a bit more, shoulders shifting under the leather of his jacket. There’s a kiss in the breeze that means fall is around the corner, up 5th and downtown. 

Derek is huddled up on the steps at the south end of the square, wrapped up in himself, and Stiles spares a quick look around – Subway still closed, park still roped off, curfew still in control, commuters not yet awake – before he crosses the empty space in long strides. 

“You’re up early,” Derek says, and his voice is rough, heavy sand on a cold beach. 

“Promised you I would be,” Stiles says, sits down next to him, takes a sip of coffee. “Downtown still fucked?” 

“It’s lost,” Derek says, and he lets out a long breath. Stiles know that he wants a cigarette, but there’s not any of that coming in. Hasn’t been that way for a long time. “Can’t believe you buy into that highway robbery.”

“Gotta get my fix,” Stiles says, saluting with his coffee, and he can smile at that, because Derek knows that when Stiles smirks he really means _I love you_. 

“I’ve gotta go-“

“Yeah, I know, don’t stick around here. Can’t have you getting killed.”

“They’d kill you too.”

“Probably,” Stiles says, and hauls Derek in by the front of his jacket, kissing him, breathing in the broken shards of voice that drop from Derek’s lips when he makes a cut, quick sob of a sound, one of his hands coming up to cup the back of Stiles’ neck. He pulls back just far enough to press a second kiss, smaller, quieter, to Stiles’ scar, and then he’s up and off. Stiles watches as he tucks his hands into his pockets, but he doesn’t look back.

They stopped looking back years ago. 

\---

Lydia sits in the half open window, staring at the buildings across the street, and when Stiles comes up behind her he can see that she’s watching a cat. It’s fluffy, sitting in the spare bit of space between the edge of a window and an AC unit, and it has bright blue eyes. 

“Don’t make a cute remark,” Lydia says, turns to Stiles with pursed lips, and she’s wearing the lipstick from the other day, blood red and blooming. It sits on her face better than Allison’s. 

“Wasn’t going to. Danny?”

“In the kitchen, just got here.”

Danny has his feet up on the table, no one cares, there’s a knife embedded in the middle of the surface and one of Allison’s rifles is sitting disassembled across the scarred top. There is light from the afternoon spilling across the tightly packed buildings, and it falls across Danny’s legs in a slit of overexposure from the window.

“Where are we headed today?” Danny asks, and when he stands up Stiles can tell that he’s still recovering from breaking his leg. Won’t slow him down much though, Danny’s got quick hands, quicker eyes, and a mean swing. “Downtown?”

“Not worth it,” Stiles says. “Gone down the shitter.”

Danny sighs, and they watch movies on Allison’s laptop, eat dinner, something that’s rice and beans and what spices they’ve got left because that’s all they’ve got left, and they hit the ground running as the sun sets. 

Curfew in effect, howls on the wind, and the beasts that lumber out of the dark are like this always now, so far gone that they’re dead husks, fur and tattered eyes, blues yellows reds ambers. 

Stiles goes at it with a couple of sharpened crowbars this time, and he’s aware of the way the wolves lumber, that they’re new. More and more people every day are going under claw and tooth and it doesn’t bode well. 

Danny puts a bullet between the last wolf’s eyes, and they stand there for a moment, panting and surrounded by the grey and red of a dying city, and when Stiles looks at Danny he knows that they’re thinking similar things, through the haze of adrenaline. 

There’s no one left to enforce curfew, so they go the river and Danny sits on the edge of a pier, watching the churning of the dark waters under his feet. 

“I miss home,” Danny says suddenly, and then he frowns. “Never mind.”

“Nah, man, I know,” Stiles says, and the only sound is the river and the wind and howling. 

\---

The boundary gets moved north. 

“By executive order of the NYMP, you are ordered to evacuate or be left without protection.”

It’s been looping all morning from speakers on heavily armored trucks with sound canons on top, things that were developed to bring crowds to their knees and do little on the wolves. Even with all their fancy tech on the lines, nothing is stopping the wolves. Not even the live, human ones that are stalking through downtown.

_By order, by order, by order._

“That’s it, then,” Lydia says, and they watch the sunrise with the announcement. “I’ll tell Derek and Scott.” 

Allison reaches out, a hand around Lydia’s wrist, and she stills, looks down at where Allison has the pad of her thumb against her pulse point, and Stiles watches as she rubs the skin there, wonders what she thinks when she feels Lydia’s heartbeat so close to her surface. They’re fragile, they all are, butterfly wings up against the hordes. 

“I’ll do it,” Allison says, and Lydia gives a curt nod, sits down on the couch with Danny. 

Stiles trails after Allison, down the narrow hallway, stepping over pairs of blood stained boots and a kit of throwing knives. 

In the kitchen Allison pulls down a mason jar from above the sink, and works on finding a lighter as Stiles rips a piece of paper off the pad by the phone. In his compact, angular handwriting he scrawls simple words.

_Boundary going north. MS Park new meeting point._

Allison takes the paper from him, and Stiles watches as she strikes a match, smells the chemicals in the smoke from the sudden ignition, and breaths in the rough air as she lights the paper and drops it into the jar. The lid goes on, and the paper is left as black ash in the glass, joining a thousand scattered messages beforehand. 

_Buried him with wolfsbane, as asked._

_No no no no no that’s not what was supposed to happen he was supposed to be_ immune _you said he’d be ok._

_Are you sure? That has to be wrong._

_Boundary going north. US new meeting point._

_Boundary going north. WSP new meeting point._

_City Hall Park._

_We need to set up a meeting point._

_Humans unaffected, it’s just after the bite that the wolves are going crazy. Alphas out of control, unable to shift back?_

_Made it to NYC. Updates as we get a handle on what’s going on._

_Keep safe._

\---

Stiles knows when they lose this ground it’s going to start getting risky, because Central Park is a perfect ambush murder ground, not a spot to meet. Either the MP or the wolves are going to get them first, but it won’t be pretty either way. 

He rubs at his scar without thinking, staring at the ceiling. The sheets smell like Allison and Lydia because no one really knows who goes with what room anymore, and when the door creaks open, Stiles expects it to be one of the girls or Danny.

Instead the person who comes in with the light from the hallway and slips into bed with him is rough, uneven, smells like leather and blood and dirt and Stiles rolls over without thinking, the sheets a mess beneath their bodies. 

“You idiot-“ Stiles has Derek’s head between his hands, and the kiss is rough and angry and Derek growls in the air between them, the shared space. “You can’t be here, they’ll kill you-“

“What about you-“

“Fuck me,” Stiles breaths, and it’s as much an answer to the statement as an invitation, and Stiles has one foot planted on the bed, the other thrown over Derek’s shoulder, and he has to brace himself on the wall, palms flat and strong against the muted paint. 

“We’re loosing,” Derek gasps into Stiles’ mouth, against chapped lips, and Stiles nods, moans, rolls his hips into the heat of Derek’s body, rhythm, breath. 

Their foreheads rest together, and there is sweat and come and blood between them from where Derek had cut into Stiles’ hips and Stiles had bitten through Derek’s shoulder, the skin stretched and sunkissed even under all the layers. The space around them is calm for once, and they share it, pressed and linked together and Stiles runs his hands down Derek’s back, smooth, muscles shifting under rough palms. 

“Don’t die,” Stiles says later, when they’re standing in the hallway, Derek stalled halfway to the stairs. 

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Derek says. Stiles nods, licks his lips, and Derek’s eyes flare red, and Stiles knows there’s a storm on the horizon. 

\---

It’s raining, and they’re standing under a metal globe and there are people streaming into the Subway, yelling and shouting and pushing and the four of them move against it all, stand in among empty cars in the circle. 

The MP have finally fled. No one’s getting across the crippled bridges, through the broken tunnels, and there are people dying in the rivers, snipers on the opposite banks keeping the water red. 

Derek and Scott are the first to break the barricades, and the six of them all stand in the street together, watch the rain come down, fractured and distorted in the headlights of abandoned cars and trucks. 

“It was an honor,” Allison says, bitter laughter, right before she kisses Scott, and he snarls, pulls their bodies together. Danny smirks at that, hefts his submachine a bit higher. 

“Or something,” Lydia says, rolls her eyes, and flips her palms at her sides, level with her shoulders, and there is suddenly a ring of fire around them, climbing across wet pavement and slick cars and woven between Lydia’s fingers. 

“Sorry,” Derek says to Stiles, and Stiles shrugs, checks to make sure his guns aren’t jammed. There is howling coming up Broadway, terrible, horrible, broken howling, now that there aren’t MP to police the barricades, to keep the wolves down. 

“Nothing to apologize for,” Stiles says, and he tips his head back up towards the sky, lets his hood fall from his head, and loves the feel of the rain on his face for that brief moment, across cooling skin and a broken smile. 

There are pinpricks of light, of blue and yellow and red and amber, and when that unholy, undead howl takes up again, Derek and Scott answer it with one of their own, still full of life, carried by Lydia’s fire. 

Stiles raises his guns, lines up on red, and fires.


End file.
